


our cant's were born to happen (our mosts have died in more)

by fartherfaster



Series: Imperious Wrecks [6]
Category: Agent Carter (TV), Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Established Relationship, I Saw Three Ships, Multi, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-26
Updated: 2016-12-26
Packaged: 2018-09-12 05:37:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 6,517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9058012
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fartherfaster/pseuds/fartherfaster
Summary: Theirs was the three body problem; they had never embraced so intimately without him there to moderate, to orchestrate, to guide their competitive motions.-The island is rocketed full of holes and scarcely holding on to its place in the ocean, but it’s balmy, and for the moment quiet. The bright Mediterranean sun pushes through the cracks in the old palace vault-work."I'll simply never tell a soul," says Peggy.-our cant's were born to happenour mosts have died in moree.e. cummings, "i am so glad and very"





	1. Prologue - 1943

**Author's Note:**

  * For [blackglass](https://archiveofourown.org/users/blackglass/gifts).



> happy christmas bb
> 
> this is not what you asked for

The island is rocketed full of holes and scarcely holding on to its place in the ocean, but it’s balmy, and for the moment quiet. The bright Mediterranean sun pushes through the cracks in the old palace vault-work.

“You know,” she says to the crumbling ceiling, “I’ll never tell a soul--”

“Tell ‘em what?” Steve asks. Bucky waggles his brows and crawls a little close to Peggy, flashing his teeth. She shrieks a laugh and bats at his head. 

“What kind of lovers you are,” Peggy says, her tone light, “but my word. I’m a changed woman,” she teases them. 

“Pegs,” Bucky says, flopping over to his back, “you can’t go around sayin’ that, not even to us,” he complains. “Like this lunk needs any of it going to his thick head.” 

“He’s the thick one? What did I just say,” Peggy sighs, eyes closing as she curls deeper into the forgotten down duvet, “I simply am _never_ breathing a word of it.” 

Steve feels himself warm all the way down his chest. The feeling lasts, spreads, and when he feels too warm behind his ears, he rolls over.


	2. Deus Ex Machina

One of the lab boys - and a boy, really, but they all look ten years too young to Peggy, they always have - comes dashing up the corridor and catches himself with curled fingers on the door’s frame. “Chief Carter,” he starts, out of breath, “please, Chief, come quick.”

Peggy puts down her pens decisively. “Tell me now,” she orders.

“Mr. Stark says he doesn’t even know,” the boy gushes, “but he’s asking for you. Please, Chief.”

From the other side of the drafting table, Jack Thompson and Daniel Sousa exchange looks. Another wave of Leviathan girls - now theatrically renamed Black Widows - have just been uncovered scant days previous. As far as Peggy can tell, however, they are much too young and much too fast to bother with any physical intimacies associated with the new nomenclature before shooting, poisoning, strangling, stabbing, or garrotting their targets. The early, bloodthirsty ranks like _Dottie from Iowa_ had been recruited to the program too old; their penchants for indulgent, messy murders made them liabilities. These new girls, truly girls, are much more detached in their operations. Peggy had watched a cornered, prepubescent child put her own girl-sized gun in her mouth just the day before. She is privately very glad that Steve will never know how the war would drag out so, warped to yoke on the thin shoulders of children.

Peggy snaps closed the folders she reads from, and pushes them in Thompson’s direction. “Sort and lock these,” she tells him. He jumps to the task, and Peggy is thankful for his quick, hungry nature. Though it took work, he is now as respectful of her as he was of Chief Dooley. “Sousa,” she says, already halfway out the door, “get the rest of the team in here, lead a debrief on an updated assessment. I’ll be back.” Her heels crack smoothly as she follows the nervy scientist back down the corridor.

-

“Howard,” she says, rounding the corner, “Howard, what on Earth is it that you couldn’t come get me yourself?”

“Pegs,” he warns, “pal, don’t get any closer.”

The technicians on the other side of the room are all pressed against the walls, their nervous shoulders shivering near their ears. A few brave souls flutter around Stark, taking useful measurements and feeding him whispers of encouraging data. It’s the Cube, the Tesseract, the thing that made Schmidt disappear. She thinks of Steve’s crackling voice over the radio, how lost he sounded when he said in such simple terms _he’s gone_.

Gone, Peggy thinks, but not dead. Evil, the kind of evil like Schmidt, never properly dies. That would be too satisfying. The Cube, however, is not news itself. It’s been in their possession for some weeks now, and Peggy has had telephone calls and visits from no fewer than four international leaders pestering her, nimble-fingered and frothing at the mouth for information. Politics as practiced by men, she thinks, is a bestial feast; they are too hungry and too blunt for any finesse. She’s selfishly grateful she’s one of few women - distrust amid their sex ends in cold, quiet bloodshed. Men on the whole are much more predictable, much more greedy. Like Howard, she thinks fondly, recalling his lazy smirk over a billiards table in a dim traincar. Howard right now is different, though, in this light of pure discovery, honest creation. Skirt-chasing is for his hindbrain. In his field, he toes the maniacal line between man and God.

“All right,” Peggy says, taking half a step back. She puts her hand on the stock of her pistol, tucked into its holster at her armpit. They have moved bases from the New York downtown core to Camp Lehigh, and she has shifted away once again from her more frivolous outfits; blouse, trousers, boots, pincurls, and red lipstick are her wartime trademarks, and she’ll be damned before she lets them go. Tension and memory ratchet down her spine - it was an atmosphere just like this that cost them Dr. Erskine. “I’ll not come any closer. But you needed me?”

An honest smile flickers over his shoulder. “You’re my best friend,” he tells her, “I’ll always need ya.”

Peggy blinks and swallows, the non-sequitur shouldn’t be so surprising from Howard, of all people. The technicians around the room still their motions, and everyone seems to hold a puzzled breath. Howard continues, willfully ignorant: “But there’s something going on here that just blows everything we used to know about the Cube to high Hell, and you gotta believe me, because that’s what happened to the other lab, I swear it.”

Peggy catches the acrid, nasty taint lingering in the air, and twists to look over her shoulder, where the other lab is, in fact, closed up, its reinforced windows full of hairline fractures and opaque with thin smoke. Howard’s face, when he turns to look at her, is mildly sooty and bright with accomplishment. Peggy resists the urge to sigh. “So you blew the place to Kingdom Come? Why didn’t I hear it?”

“You were yelling.”

“I don’t yell,” she retorts.

Howard radiates impatience without moving a hairsbreadth. “It’s not only responding to stimulus on this side,” he tells her.

“Side?” Peggy interrupts, “What side.”

“Not like that,” Howard quickly corrects her, “but just listen, pal, listen. I think the whole purpose of this thing is that it’s a means of transport.”

“For people?” Peggy asks, tone cautious.

“For people, for objects, for thoughts-” Howard starts, moving into the abstract quickly. “Think of it like, like…” he searches for words. “Here,” he explains, “the Cube is aware-”

“Aware?” interrupts Peggy.

“Yes, aware of where it is. Where it has been. In the case of anyone who has handled it directly, it’s been wherever they’ve been thinking of, too.”

“How do you reckon,” she demands.

“Because it’s quantum entanglement,” Howard’s explanation breezes past her, though he’s still standing stock-still, his hands inside massive mechanical gloves that link to a delicate mechanism of pinchers and pokers, investigating the Cube in its housing, “and the Cube interacts with its users on a neurological level.”

“Howard,” Peggy tells him, “what does this mean? What are you trying to tell me?”

“That we’ve gotta be damn careful,” he says, and then he looks around the room, eyeing all the assistants suspiciously. “Every last one of you,” he barks, “out!”

“Howard,” Peggy scolds.

“No, Pegs,” he says. “Just listen.” The white coats file out of the room with hasty distress - Howard doesn’t have the bearing of a particularly large man, but his known ruthlessness feeds fear in those targeted. The door slams after the last scientist leaves, and it echoes around the room. Howard, very delicately, takes his hands from the gloves. Ironmonger’s hands, Peggy thinks in a flash of distraction, heavy and scarred and calloused and capable, the tools of his trade at odds with the slick playboy personality he employs for recreation and publicity.

Peggy makes her way around the room, slapping at the switches for the recording cameras and the audio feeds. Her status as chief lends her a thin varnish, impervious to immediate questioning when the ends justify her means.

“Imagine whatever you thought this thing was capable of,” Howard says grandly, “and put it to the power of one hundred, hell, one thousand. This thing is like looking at infinity itself.”

“Pure potential,” Peggy says. “And that’s quite fine, that’s just grand. But what are we to _do_ with it?” She supposes Howard’s creative genius blossoms where her own withers - she prefers to get from A to B with as little fuss as possible, too impatient to invent, too impatient for success. She thinks, for a brief moment, of Steve’s steadfast determination, so bullheaded and self-righteous that he wouldn’t see the open door behind him for the wall in front of him. Howard would sooner disintegrate and reintegrate his very atoms than walk to Austria, consequences be damned, would only settle for some daring-do piloting to satisfy Peggy’s timetable. She shakes out the nostalgia, cross with herself for looking at such reckless behaviour so fondly.

“Don’t just think about physical distance,” Howard says, and in such a sharp tone that he seems to think she’s being willfully obtuse. “Peggy,” he insists, “time travel.”

“What.” The philosophers were evidently wrong, she thinks; necessity, it would seem, is not the mother of invention, but rather a distant and not well-liked cousin only rarely invited over for dinner.

“Imagine,” he extols, “killing Hitler before he could even get political, imagine,” he waves his hands in a grand gesture, “talking to Tesla again!”

Peggy’s temper pitches up in a hot flare. “Listen to yourself,” she barks. Howard blinks at her, birdlike and startled. “Weapons,” she tells him, “defensive mechanisms, fireless explosions. _Thought transference,_ ” her shoulders rise up in her exasperation, “ _unbreakable codes_.” Howard’s mouth has settled into an ugly line. “Helpful tools we can actually use,” Peggy insists, “would do us a great service. Much better, anyone with _half a brain_ would think,” she jibes purposefully, “than fanciful nonsense that would literally undo us if it went wrong.”

“Nothing’s going wrong,” Howard growls back, “Peggy, it’s an idea. It’s a boundary science has never been able to push before.” Over his shoulder, the Cube begins to flare, its glow extending and retreating.

“Nothing’s going wrong,” Peggy repeats flatly, staring at the Cube with intent. Howard wheels back around.

“Oh,” he says, “oh, fuck.”

The light swells, and Howard beside her is stiff with terror. “We’re okay,” he tells her, “I’ll figure it out.” Peggy knows they don’t have that kind of time. He aims for reassuring and falls desperately short. Howard Stark, the personality, can drip lies off his tongue like honey. Howard Stark, the ironmonger, has hands incapable of telling any story but metal-edged truths. His body gives him away, Peggy thinks.

“What’s the worst that could happen?” she asks through gritted teeth. She clings to the relief that Howard dismissed all the assistants already, though many are likely no farther than the other side of the door and its flimsy protection.

“Implosion?” Howard scrambles, “explosion? Pegs, I don’t know anything.”

Peggy forcefully takes him by the neck and with all her weight sends him to the door as the light takes on qualities of sound, humming and rattling her ribs. “Get everyone out,” she orders, “evacuate campus!” She pushes him again towards the door, wondering if the blast will be too much, or like a grenade, if it can be muffled by solid proximity. Howard is halfway out the door and shouting at the top of his voice, and then all sound stops; Peggy feels the physical vacuum of it, her breath drawn from her throat, and decides in that instant that yes, if Steve could make this sacrifice, so can she. She slams the door with Howard on the far side of it, and then throws herself towards the damned thing that has already cost her so, so much.


	3. You're Faithful to the Better Man

_You're faithful to the better man, I'm afraid that he left_

_So let me judge your love affair in this very room_

_Where I have sentenced mine to death_

_I'll even wear these old laurel leaves that he's shaken from his head_

_Just take this longing from my tongue_

_All the lonely things my hands have done_

_Let me see your beauty broken down_

_Like you would do for one your love_

Leonard Cohen, "Take this Longing"

 

* * *

 

“ _Christ Almighty!_ ” She’s not expecting the crash into the floor, is the other way of putting it.

“What the _motherfucking_ -”

Peggy blinks, gasping. Her vision is fogged and watery. The light in the room has become harsh, and there is the distinct smell of burning. She wasn’t able, apparently, to catch the Cube’s casing before it fell from its disintegrating supports, and she finds herself on her hands, lying curled around the fallen device. Only this isn’t Howard’s floor, this isn’t the lab at the SSR’s Lehigh base. But that’s Howard, on his hands and knees, just before her, though his clothes… Peggy blinks her watering eyes. Howard Stark has aged twenty years in the space of a breath, and he’s closer than he should be, on the wrong side - she’d shoved him out the door when it was clear the Cube was active.

“You’re Peggy Carter,” Howard says, but that’s not the way Howard speaks. Peggy feels cold dread wash down her spine, and she is up on her feet in an instant, pistol drawn. She steals glances at the backs of her own hands, and is relieved to find them unaged, unchanged.

“And you’ve made a damn fine attempt at Stark’s mustache, but you’re not him. So how the Hell did I get here, and who in the name of Christ do you think you are?” Peggy feels her control unspooling, curses rolling out of her in the place of panic. Distantly, there is an alarm, and the sound of running boots. She twitches a muscle in her ankle, discretely. Her backup pistol is still there, tucked into her boot.

The man - and then he looks so like Howard that it makes Peggy terribly nervous because she can tell _he’s not_ \- blinks at her in fascination. His throat works for a moment, and then he tells her, “Well, there’s good news and there’s bad news, so what would you like first?”

Peggy cocks her pistol, in no mood for games. The pounding steps are getting closer. A glass door retreats into the wall it hinges on, and a full figure, head to toe in black, draws up short. He is tall, broad-shouldered, deep-chested. His familiar mouth falls slack; his long hair clings to his lips. Peggy starts to shake. “Tell me,” she says, in a voice like ashes, “tell me where I am and who you are.”

“Stark,” the man threatens, and Peggy feels her resolve collapsing; she feels hollow-chested, hollow-boned. She takes another breath and it feeds her muscles, feeds physical calm in her body so unlike the riot in her mind, because she _knows_ intimately that voice and it’s been so long.

“Stark, if this is some kind of joke-” he growls, stalking into the room. One hand reaches into the back of his waistband, the other he holds palm-up to her like some kind of offering, some kind of sacrifice. Peggy has not believed in God nor mercy for a very long time and his gesture is a mockery of everything she has lost. She clenches her jaw so tightly her teeth ache with it. Peggy clings to the revealed information. This man is a Stark, she thinks, but Howard never had a brother…

“I didn’t do it on purpose,” he responds, and Peggy thinks of defensive, guilty children, caught out. She’s apparently not alone.

“Horseshit,” says the man with long hair, with sharp blue eyes that have conspiratorily found hers over shoulders they both loved. “If this is some kind of joke,” he repeats, and Peggy recognises the violence in that face, promised devastation in the set of his posture.

“Not a joke,” says Howard’s look-alike. “I can’t explain it right now, but that’s definitely her.”

The ghost still holds out one hand, and he turns to her. “Carter?”

Peggy draws her gun up further, a level dozen paces from his chest. He doesn’t back away, but instead just puts both his mismatched palms out towards her, heavenward in benediction. “It’s me,” he says, “in the flesh.” Then he stops and peers at his left hand, the silver fingertips peeking out from a fingerless leather glove, “Mostly in the flesh,” he corrects with an easy shrug, waggling the metal fingers in apology. “Pegs, I’m real.”

Peggy’s vision swims. “You died,” she whispered. “You fell from that _bloody_ train in the Alps.” Her voice is ironclad, but her heart rackets around under her ribs. She can scarcely draw a breath. “And we,” she says, her lips tremble to form the words, “we _grieved,”_ she sucks in a breath, “Steve.” She cannot, however, finish the thought. They hadn’t grieved, not really, not properly. She grew warlike, clinging to Steve as he grew reckless, and then without either of them, with only Howard left to box their shadows with his extravagant endeavours and distractions… Without either of them she packed her sadness so deeply away that only the Commandos could see it, and only then when she let them. Howard knows better than to look for it - knows better than to unfairly pull on the same threads that stitch him together, too, as he trawls in the arctic every few months.

“Aw,” he complains, “you know us Brooklyn Irish,” he says, shrugging his shoulder. He’s so familiar, so real. “We’re tougher than that.”

Peggy very slowly holsters her gun, and he takes the invitation, walking up to her. He stops just short of arm’s reach. Peggy’s tears come unbidden. Her words come out in a bubbled breath. “Look at you,” she says.

“Sure, look at me,” he agrees, “but I didn’t get so ugly as to make you cry, did I?” With that, he folds her into his arms and Peggy goes willfully, her nose pressed into his shoulder. He cups the back of her head, warm fingers on her nape.

“Stark, get out,” he says, “go get ‘em.”

Peggy snuffles and looks up at Bucky. “Get who?” she asks. “And who’s that Stark?”

Bucky gently turns her face back down to his exposed throat, pressing a kiss to her hair and then rubbing his stubbled cheek against her temple. So, so familiar, even this embrace. They’d never been so intimate without that other presence, and Peggy feels overwhelmingly exposed. Simultaneously grateful, too; theirs was the three body problem, and they had never touched without him there to moderate, orchestrate, to guide their competitive motions. Now, however, his arms are tight around her shoulders and waist. Peggy leans into his chest. “You’re gonna want to sit down, sweetheart,” he tells her.

Peggy doesn’t demand to know what else could be so shocking, what obvious _else_ could upend her today, and instead thumps her palm against his flank. “Don’t you start with that sweetheart business,” she says, “I’ll get very cross with you.” The effect is ruined as fresh tears rise.

“Okay,” he agrees easily, “okay, nothin’ of that, then.” He pauses, and then says, “I don’t know how to tell you, Peg, but it’s been a long time.”

Peggy leans back in his embrace. “I’m in the future,” she says, looking at his expression carefully. Barnes falters, and then he grins with all his teeth.

“Look at you,” he says, ducking in and squeezing her again, his nose under the corner of her jaw. “Running circles round us, just like always.” He frog-marches them back to one of the laboratory benches and Peggy perches there delicately. He seems reluctant to let her go, and instead leans against her side, wrapping one arm around her shoulders, an easy embrace, shoulders level. Then he takes a deep breath. “That fella,” he starts, tipping his head in the direction of the door, “well, you can tell he’s a Stark. I’m not lyin’.”

“All right,” Peggy agrees. Her hand grips the edge of the tabletop and she waits for the other shoe to drop.

“‘S name’s Tony. He’s Howard’s kid.”

“Howard’s _kid_ ,” she repeats. “He’s older than How - oh.”

“Yeah.” Bucky rubs his palm over his stubbled jaw.

“Enough about Stark,” she busies, “both of them,” she adds hastily. “Tell me about _you_.”

Bucky looks down at the floor as he speaks. “When Zola had me,” he says, “he… experimented.”

Peggy does not do him the indignity of cooing and consoling, but rather just listens. “Some serum variant,” he explains after a pause, “‘bout as hardy as what Steve’s got.” Hearing that name fall from Bucky’s tongue makes Peggy’s heart clench, but she remains still. “They found me at the bottom of the Alps, Hydra did.” There’s another long pause where Bucky breathes deeply, slowly. “And then,” he waggles his metal fingers in a perverse gesture, and Peggy represses a shiver; he’s not purposely threatening her, just being black in his humour. “They picked up where they left off.” Then he looks at her, mouth turned sourly. She can see the decisions being made by the twitches across his brow, by the way his mouth purses and relaxes. “They kept it up for seventy years, give or take.”

Peggy does not choke on her breath, but it’s a near thing. “What year is it now,” she demands quietly.

The door on the other end of the laboratory hisses open again. “It’s,” that old voice says, “it’s 2017.” Steve, and it is him, with his too-loose too-tight futuristic clothes, standing there in the doorway, looking just as overwhelmed and breathless and stunned as when he’d been helped down from the Vita-Ray. Peggy slips from the bench to her feet, and she only stays upright because Bucky keeps his arm around her shoulders.

“Stev-” she tries, but this time she does choke, and the tears that come crawl right out of her heart, right up her throat, it’s all she can do to stand there and weakly extend her arms, Bucky’s hand high on her back, warm on her spine.

Steve runs. It’s only two dozen paces mocked by a few giant strides before he’s wrapped one arm around her waist and the other across her shoulders, his hand in her hair. Their last kiss had been chaste for happening at such an awkward moment - this is anything but. Their mouths are momentarily slack when they meet, the shock of sensation pulls a matching gasp from both throats. Peggy cups his face in her hands, drawing him in. Her tongue traces the edge of his lip and he mimics her; she feels one big hand cradle the back of her head and she arches into him, licking at the sharp edge of his teeth. Steve wraps his arm tightly around her waist, his tongue tracing a delicate line behind her teeth, curling over her own tongue, and then retreating, touching her lips once, twice, and then pulling away. Peggy holds on to him, chasing, and he soothes her with a series of short, flush kisses. They breathe like that for a moment, eyes closed. Peggy feels the flush climb her cheeks and ducks her head, pressing her face into Steve’s neck, her nose under the corner of his jaw.

Steve cradles her close, glancing up to Bucky at odd intervals. Peggy wants nothing more than to vanish somewhere with them, these men she thought lost to her. “What,” she asks Steve, perceptive to his amused air.

Steve smiles a little. “Just never seen Stark speechless, that’s all,” he says, and then adds after a moment, “Tony, that is. You made Howard plenty speechless.”

“Hey,” Bucky interrupts, “there was that time with the pushups,” he says, “she got all of us, that time.”

Peggy holds on to Steve’s arm, tucking her hand into the bend of his elbow. That he’s only wearing an undershirt makes the gesture incredibly intimate. Of the three, not one of them can keep from smiling, though hers is decidedly watery. Bucky leans in close and catches a tear on his thumb. “You’re all right,” he tells her, because if anyone can see the toll of loving Steve, it’s someone else who carries that same torch. Peggy’s hand slides down Steve’s arm to lock tightly on his wrist, but the rest of her pitches forward, once more her cheek pressed against the steady thrum of Bucky’s heart. It’s been nearly five years since she lost them, three and a half of lonely, lonely work at the SSR. The relief she feels, that that loneliness has finally abated, washes over her in waves. Steve, under her hand, grows agitated.

“Peggy,” he asks insistently, a hand on her waist, “what can we do?”

She pulls a handkerchief from her sleeve and dabs at her eyes and nose, collecting herself. “I would like,” she says, iron returning to her voice and posture, “to not do this in public.” By the time Peggy has neatly tucked her handkerchief away, she feels like she could muster for inspection, especially with these two at her back. It’s a good thing, too.

“Knock knock,” calls Tony, strolling in. He stops well short of actually approaching them, and Peggy feels her curiosity spike; Steve’s smile has evaporated. “Cap,” he greets Steve, and Peggy begins to understand the tension, “Barnes,” he nods to Bucky, who only drops his chin in recognition of address. Tony is unphased by this stony front. “So,” he says, looking directly at her, “time travel, huh. How about that.”

Peggy has to stop herself from sighing and laughing simultaneously. Tony - she can’t bring herself to think of him as _Stark_ , because _Stark_ means _Howard_ , means this man’s father, and what kind of woman would ever convince Howard to put a ring on her finger - catches her expression and narrows his eyes at her.

“As a matter of fact,” she says, “those were the very words your father used.” Something ugly slides over his features and he schools it away very quickly. “Though this was quite accidental,” she excuses.

“I’ve called Foster,” he continues as if she hadn’t spoken, and this name means something to Steve and Bucky, who both nod. “By Starkjet Norway’s six hours, weather permitting. As the hammer flies, four and change. Either way, you three can play hooky for the rest of the day, cause Bruce and I don’t even know how to start looking at this until she gets here.”

“Other scientists?” Peggy asks, ignoring the bits she didn’t understand. It works on Howard, she reasons.

“Yeah,” he agrees, slowly wandering closer, his hands never still. He pokes and plucks at things he must’ve been working on earlier - for the drama of her entrance into this decade, very little looks disturbed in the laboratory. “We’ll do introductions later. We’ll do,” he stops, waving his hand loosely in her direction, gesturing to encompass _leur corps entières_ , “everything later.” His expression twitches again into something uncomfortable, subtly unbalanced. Peggy thinks, for a startled moment, of Jack Thompson’s wounded, ugly pride - an expression she’d never seen on Howard’s features. She wonders if this is how it would manifest.

Peggy belatedly realises she has been maintaining her iron grip on Steve’s wrist. He likewise hasn’t noticed, but her hand is beginning to cramp. She relaxes her clawlike fingers, but Steve turns his hand into her palm.

Steve is nodding to Tony. “All right,” he says, agreeable, but by no means friendly, “we just need a little time.”

Tony waves dismissively again, and the habit begins to grate on Peggy’s sensibilities. “You two are the experts,” he says, and then wanders out.

Peggy looks at Bucky as Tony’s footsteps echo away. “What an unpleasant man,” she wonders. “Not that Howard was a beacon of sensitivity, but you’d think-”

“Leave it be, love,” Bucky says. “I think you two knew a very different Howard than he did.” He slides his arm around her waist and claps Steve on the shoulder. “Home?” he asks.

 

-

 

The elevator - buttonless, operated by a swipe card - goes on for ages, and when they step off, Peggy is momentarily dazzled by their spectacular height. “We’re a hundred storeys up,” she marvels. Walking straight up to the window, she peers down on the city. “My God,” she whispers. The changes are staggering. The colours, the people, the amount of life happening so, so far below takes her breath away. Steve steps up close behind her.

“It’s something else,” he says quietly, after a moment. “But you’ll get the hang of things just fine.”

“Certainly,” she says lightly, but all the same she leans back, bumping her shoulder into his chest to make sure he’s still real. “One thing at a time, though,” she asserts, “starting with you two.”

Bucky holds out a hand - his warm one. He’s careful about presenting the prosthetic to her, and Peggy vows to investigate that when everything else settles. She takes his hand. “You live here?” she asks, looking back and forth between them.

Bucky’s brows pinch. “Together, you mean?”

She rolls her eyes at him and huffs theatrically; Bucky’s face lightens considerably. “I mean here, in this same building.”

Steve leans his shoulder against the door, pausing to look at her before he lets it swing in. “Yeah,” he explains, “I didn’t, at first, but when we got Buck back, it made sense.”

“You can’t lay low in Washington,” Bucky complains, “nothin’ ever happens there.”

Steve fixes him with a challenging look. “It was plenty exciting that one time.”

Bucky gives Steve a shove, and Steve shoves him back, and they bump and jostle into the foyer and kitchen with familiarity that makes Peggy ache. How she missed these boys, and how it fills her with gladness to see them, at their cores, not drastically changed. She catches Bucky’s indulgent whine, “But Steve, _that was one time_.”

“ _We ruined a highway!_ ” Steve returns in exasperation. “Hell, multiple highways.” He pauses, grinning at Peggy as she lingers, leaning quietly against a wall. She’s not much for watching, but her eyes and heart are hungry for the vision they make. “In fact,” he says, in a devastating affection of his stage persona, “you broke into a museum to get your blue coat back.”

“You broke in first!” Bucky defends himself, and then he leaps cat-like around Steve’s shoulders, and they both go down in a heap. Peggy presses a hand to her chest; Steve’s face is bright and carefree in ways that remind of the memories she’d been struggling to hold on to. The air around her, for the first time in years, is thick with laughter.

Steve manages to find his feet, and he slings a squawking Bucky over his shoulder with a great deal of cursing and back-slapping. They had never the opportunity to be playful or tactile like this in her presence; the war effort left everyone so subdued. Steve opens his free arm to Peggy, and she sidles over to him, prepared to walk their apartment and gawp at all the future’s domestic advances. Steve catches her by surprise, though, and rolls her up onto his other shoulder.

Peggy gives his arse a solid smack and squeals, “When did you turn into such a brute?”

Bucky grins at her, just as upside-down as she is. “This is what I’ve been dealin’ with, Pegs,” he extols, “thank God you’re here; you’re the only one he ever listened to.”

Steve is laughing, patiently walking the length of a hardwood corridor, absolutely unperturbed by the ruckus his load stages in protest.

Peggy doesn’t mind the nostalgia in Bucky’s voice - Steve never listened to her, precisely, but he tended to agree that her plans meant the Commandos could commit their recklessness more efficiently. “For a given definition of listening,” she tells Bucky, and then pinches the meat of Steve’s thigh when it’s within reach. “Which he isn’t doing just now!”

Steve yelps, and Bucky is tossed back to his feet with a hefty shove. Peggy watches upside down as he lands gracefully on his feet. “Punk,” he complains. He proceeds to toe out of his boots before walking out of her sight.

Peggy expects to also find her feet, but Steve only tips her forward enough to catch the backs of her knees with his free arm and swing her into a bridal carry. Her face feels too hot as she takes in the new surroundings; they’re just a step away from the door to their shared bedroom. Bucky sprawls across the bed, propped up against the pillows, head tilted to watch them. She wraps her fingers tightly around Steve’s hand at her waist, her elbow still locked around the nape of his neck. She swears, in that moment, that her heart must be beating hard enough to thump against Steve’s own ribs; she feels fit to burst with nerves. “Don’t I get a say in this?” she asks. Her voice is not the cool brass she’s hoping for. The intended meaning of the gesture looms huge.

Steve swallows, his mouth working as he takes an awkward breath before speaking, his brows peaked and eyes downcast. “I just thought,” he starts, “I thought it’d be nice,” he says, and then he looks into her eyes carefully. “We,” he says, and Peggy can already hear _we didn’t get this far_ echoing around the empty spaces between her ribs. Steve sees it on her face. “We don’t hafta,” he smiles, a little melancholy twitch, and Peggy feels so emotionally strung out from the morning that her first reaction is to laugh - her immediate second is to bite the sound before it escapes her mouth. He glances up, his gaze skimming over Bucky before returning to her. “I’ve had dreams that weren’t even this nice,” he whispers.

Peggy urges him down with the hand on his nape, kissing him softly. “All right,” she says against his lips. “Yes.”

“‘Sposed to say ‘I do,’” Bucky calls.

“Buck,” Steve scolds through his laughter. Peggy, fighting tears, kisses him again as he carries her over the threshold.


	4. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Epilogue

“Pepper.”

The silence that stretches after Tony says her name is, without a doubt, the strangest thing to happen all day. She is between meetings - quite literally - striding down a grandiose hallway, leaving one council in her wake an approaching another one with alacrious determination. Tony’s silence renders her glued to the spot. Her assistant stands patient in her periphery.

“Tony,” she replies carefully, “Tony, what’s wrong?”

Ms. Rezayee springs to immediate action - Mr. Stark’s interference is as frequently brief and benign as it is tumultuous and strickening - and in the early days of her tenure she learned that calling heads or tails as soon as possible remains the best way to salvage a business day so interrupted. Pepper is grateful for her light nature and immovable determination.

“Dad invented time travel and forgot to tell us.”

Pepper feels herself run simultaneously hot and cold, and she hurries to an alcove, cupping her phone tighter to her head and whispering ferociously. “What?”

“Agent Peggy Carter just fell out of 1947 and into my lab.”

Pepper tries to contain herself. “How long ago?”

Tony’s snappy attitude revives with the conversation. “To her, seventy years ago.”

“ _Tony._ ”

“About fifteen minutes. Jarvis has already called for Foster and Bruce, though she’s the real expert on wormhole travel, so I figured I’d just spend the afternoon reading up-”

Pepper realises that he’s quickly sliding from panic to glib neutrality, and that may just end up causing more problems. “Where is she now?”

“With her lover-boys,” he replies, and hastily adds, “and I use the plural _boys_ with emphasis, there. You know what, actually, just as much emphasis on _lovers_ , too; honey, nobody told the history books that they were a dedicated ménage-à-trois. I feel cheated. _America_ should feel cheated.”

Pepper’s reeling mind grinds to a stop. “What.”

“Yeah,” Tony says, “the privacy protocols were dropping down after them like dominoes, and that’s what the protocols are there for, but my initial-”

“Don’t say ‘eavesdropping,’” Pepper commands.

“- _ground level research_ ,” Tony continues smoothly, “returned some surprising results-”

“Tony!”

“- which I then turned off very fast! There, tell me you’re proud. It’s already been deleted.”

“Okay,” Pepper sighs, pinching the bridge of her nose. “Okay, do you need me there? Is she violent? Can we-”

“Is she ever,” Tony lauds, “but the geriatric unit seems to have her under wraps. Foster won’t be here til evening, and they’ve presumably holed up for the rest of the day; so, uh, just don’t freak out when there’s a time-travelling feminist icon on the couch when you get home. I don’t think she bites, but the evidence heals too quickly to gauge, so -”

“Tony.”

“You get the picture,” he allows. “I just... “ and he fades out for a second, and Peggy wonders terribly what this means for him, another person who was so close with his father so long ago. “Have a good day, honey,” Tony jumps, “kick ass and spend my money, really, you do it better than I do, so have at it, I, uh-”

“I’ll try not to be late,” Pepper assures him, “but I think I’ve also got that hospital contract in the bag.”

“The bag?”

“All the hospitals on the Eastern Seaboard-” she reminds him.

“Switching over, right, I remember. Stark medical tech exclusively, wasn’t it? Wow. Really, honey, that’s great.”

“Yeah,” she says, “it’s a big step.”

“You’re a rockstar. And also my rock, come to think of it.”

Pepper smiles. “Thank you for telling me.”

“I love you,” Tony says.

Pepper takes a deep breath. “I know,” she says. “Love you too.”

“Are you zen yet?” he asks, “Cause I don’t think I could manufacture zen. That’s not really how it works, they tell me. I mean, I could try. For you I’d try.”

“Tony.”

“Okay, not helping. See you soon?”

“Yes. There needs to be lots of red wine when I come home.”

“That one I can probably manage.”

Pepper looks at her reflection in the dark shine of her phone for a moment after he hangs up. “We’ll probably be okay,” she tells her assistant.

Ms. Rezayee purses her lips suspiciously. “How much of that statement is blind faith, Ms. Potts?” she asks, not unkindly.

Pepper sighs. “Twelve percent?” She starts to walk down the corridor again, and Ms. Rezayee follows, her nose in her phone. She touches Pepper’s wrist very lightly before they go into the boardroom.

“I’ve cleared the two international teleconferences for tomorrow night,” she says. She doesn’t say _so you can go home two hours early and deal with your maniac boyfriend_ , but it’s there.


End file.
